


Le Coeur au Bonheur

by Mad_Max



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, M/M, Read at Your Own Risk, no tags
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2019-12-29 17:04:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18298508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Max/pseuds/Mad_Max
Summary: The year is 1832. Percival Graves' art career is in about as dire straights as the French monarchy, but he has found a new muse.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I did not use tags. There is no gore or weird things. But it's a Les Miserables crossover. There will be sadness. Have fun!  
> One warning for Les Mis fans - the crossover is light. The majority of characters are from Fantastic Beasts. Marius and Gros will feature, but not prominently. 
> 
> Credit to @fleuravis for all the best contributions to the conception of this utterly strange fic.

22 April 1832, Paris

 

As promised, the latest update on my position in Paris -

 

Well, I can tell you this month has risen to the task and given me much to write to you about. What an inspiring time is the springtime! Vivaldi was on to something when he filled his “Spring” with violins and gentle melody. New music. I’ve found a new muse. I feel truly as though the winter of my life had thawed. The days fall open to me like rose petals and my soul is fresh in bloom. You can see the inspiration is making me silly, a bit too French. Forgive the prose, old friend. It’s the wine speaking. My muse, where do I begin?

 

His name is Croyance. A surname is forthcoming. He’s not entirely certain how to spell it and dictates his guesses to me as I write to you. Bellebeaux or Bellebosse or something of the sort. His illiteracy has its own charms. I’ve been painting the letters into his skin with oil to teach him. It’s a silly hobby, but he likes it and can now spell out a variety of words in English which I will not commit to ink. Suffice to say, we have _progressed_.

 

It wasn’t always so! Remember when I told you of the letter from my cousin Séraphine from Marseilles? She paid a visit to me recently to commission a painting of the young Narcissus. It was charity, Theo, but I let her pretend otherwise. My work doesn’t sell as it used to. Even Gros managed to get one in the last Salon while mine was returned to me with the customary and degrading R stamped into the back of the canvas. R for “reject”. They didn’t lose the war on surplus of imagination. Ha ha. Imagine, that old ratbag with his scratchy Napoleonic castoffs dangling from the walls of the Salon. Honestly insulting. But then, we speak of a French institution. 

 

I had thought my career here finished and considered returning to dear old England to leech a bit off the fat of my inheritance now that the Mater has left us to meet her Maker, etc etc. It isn’t the same here anymore. Apropos institutions - Paris is the pot set to boil. After only two years in office, his kingship, our darling vintage Bourbon, Louis-Philippe (lovingly christened “the Pear”) grows ever riper. I doubt he’ll survive a fall from the old branch, if you know what I mean, should there be another little tea party this side of the Atlantic. Not that I spend enough time in cafes anymore, but I’ve a good sense of the atmosphere. I’ve been known to crack open a newspaper or seven with my morning tea. Your last hamper was much appreciated.

 

Croyance is a capital-c Catholique. They give silly names to their sort. Croyance/Credence. He signs his name with an X, my little Christ Child. If you had seen him the first time as I had, Theo, you would have thought he was on his way to the Crucifixion. All hollow cheeks and eyes like the Virgin wept. I needed a model for the Narcissus business, you see, so I sent a boy down to the cafe, and he brought me my dear X, laid currently across my sofa in only his skin. He’s my ticket back into the hallowed halls of the Salon. You would understand at once if you could see his face. He has the complexion of a Caravaggio - boy with fruit or the Archangel.

 

He was raised in a nunnery or a girl’s school in some dusty little corner of the city, probably the dirty laundry of some old aristocratic family. A “bosse” is a _hump_ in the old argot, you know. My little _belle_ tumbled straight from his Lady Mother’s _bosse_ into a hornet’s nest with the nuns, especially the _Mère Supérieure_. You remember the Master at Harrow who used to chalk his cane so he could be sure to hit his mark again and again? I thought you’d never walk again that last time, with the clotted creme. X is a bit of an expert himself in the matter of chalked canes. He asked that I not paint the scars, so I haven’t. It all seemed such a great jape when we were at school, but this is a different beast. Evil. If ever you needed proof that the Catholics have got it wrong - well, I shouldn’t make light of it.

 

Anyway, he came back with the boy on the promise of bread. I fed him cake and tea to make him more agreeable. He was a bit catholic about the idea of taking his clothes off for the sketching, but I had Séraphine with me to keep him amenable and to stop me interrogating him.

 

“You make him nervous,” she told me. Right she was. Poor bugger was shaking in his boots. Gave him a bit of hot chocolate, which has rather depleted my stock, but that set him right again. The Art commenced.

 

Even Séraphine was enthusiastic. I’ve drawn you up a rough line sketch in charcoal which has hopefully survived the journey without being smudged off the page. Do you see what I mean about his cheeks? The face of a Michelangelo. The way he catches the light. I’m telling you, Theo, this will be my most spectacular work yet. I’m really going to prove something here, and then we’ll have to get the boy sorted. I had thought maybe of bringing him back to England with me. He said he’d worked as a gardener in the nunnery. There’s really no lack of need round ours, and the fresh air would do him some good.

 

Boy, I keep saying. Have I mentioned to you yet that he is twenty-two? Really not so much of a boy at all. But his face is soft and he’s gentle in a funny way. Like a lion cub. There’s an odd darkness to him, which I suppose is rather par for the course with suffering and all that. Here’s one: for example, on the second day of sketching it was unseasonably warm. We’d had tea and cake. Séraphine wasn’t there, which I was glad of. It seemed to put him at ease, and I was beginning to enjoy his company as is. You know I work faster without loiterers.

 

Then, suddenly, he didn’t want to take off his shirt when I asked. He declined my offer of wine, seemed almost offended by it. When I tried to insist, he poured the glass into my rinse water. So, the kitten has claws! I shouldn’t have laughed. I regret it now, but wisdom always arrives late to the party, doesn’t she?

 

You’ve always told me to mind my impatience, Theo. You aren’t wrong. I might have shouted at him. The cavalry arrived! There was a great fanfare, quite a furious little song and dance, all in very proper, Christian French. The boy is a saint and angers like a prophet. _Mon petit Jean D’Arc_. Since then however I am beginning to wonder if he is indeed the victim on the pyre or the man with the lit torch? He keeps company with the students in the cafes. He asked as well, would monsieur also like to sodomise him?

 

Naturally I said no. Sodomise! And who am I meant to represent in this segment - de Sade? Sodomise. The word shocked something out of me, Theo, old hare. I may have been a bit too harsh in my refusal. X says he understands now. He’d no words for such things before, you see. Illiterate and innocent about much in the world, that’s how the Catholics like to keep their sort. Though I’m beginning to get the uncanny feeling he’s taken a life. He certainly holds a knife like he knows how to use it. If I stop responding, you’ll know who to track down, ha ha.

 

But kindly, Theo, gently. There is something brittle about him. You know I never had the stomach for it. Right up until the end the Mater was sending in her complaints; the peasants are poaching us out of house and home! Well, let them. A man has to eat. X eats like a little sparrow. Prays before each new item. It used to amuse me. Imagine lipping along to the Book of Common Prayer before each grape, only the humour has quite gone from it. Bastard nuns. Theo, you will think me soft in the head, but I am utterly smitten. Terribly in love, old top.

 

He tells the bawdiest jokes in his soft voice, and I am teaching him to paint still forms. He’s got a knack for it, I think. You know, sometimes we talk about what a great jape it would be to dress him up in fine things and introduce him back in England as the bastard of some Lord. He could make his own fortunes. He would have no need of me. I am terribly selfish, aren’t I? The idea fills me with dread. Still, I would do it for him. That is true love, Theo. Like yours for your Leta. Though I will never understand how you can ping-pong yourself between the pipe and the lips without developing a preference for the one over the other. Sex is music! And I return to Spring -

 

On the third day of sketching, I was just beginning to mock it all up in oils for a first go at the composition, and X tried again for sodomy. Stubborn bully that he is. I played the old game, set out the cakes, poured wine, the whole symphony. He kept on with it, bless him. Sent in the old _corps d’Armee._ Quite battered my defences. Napoleonic strategy, only this time with two victors. I acquiesced to a bit of bagpiping.

 

Suffice to say dear X had never learned to play a tune in his life. Or shall we call him Credence? I believe that’s the rough translation of _Croyance_ , which is a mouthful. Then again, it should only be fair for me to have a mouthful of him when he quite nearly took a whole steak off my _corps_ with his teeth. The scene was as follows, Theo:

 

I pulled back, my hands on his shoulder, and asked if he had ever had another man’s body in his mouth. It hadn’t felt like it.

 

“ _Mais, ouai, M’sieur_ ,” said he. “ _Chai pas, quoi. Chai embrassé le bague d’l’évêque qon chété confirmé._ ”

 

I know your French is weak, so I will translate as I go along, especially as I have taken the liberty of transcribing his rather appallingly crude accent. He had kissed the bishop’s ring when he was confirmed, Theo - imagine! I could just see him, on his knees at the alter, his black head bowed, so pious and good. I should also clarify that _bague_ belongs to the people’s argot as well, street talk for “lady bits”, with which you and not I are well acquainted. Credence informs me that it is also a term for a thief or in the thief’s lingo. More on that later.

 

Anyway, he had only ever kissed the bishop’s ring and was petrified.

 

“Well, what else did you do when you kissed the bishop’s ring?” I asked.

 

“ _Yà déposé l’hostie sur ma langue. Chlai pris_ , _quoi,_ ” he said.

 

He was wringing his hands, but all I could imagine was the dirtiest little scene. The Bishop with his ringed hand depositing a wafer on the tongue of my sweet Credence, who would take it in his mouth, obedient as a carriage horse. All wet soft things dissolving one into the other like sugar in water.

 

“And when you’ve taken the wafer in your mouth, what are you supposed to do with it?” I asked.

 

This he had to think about. There was a heady pause. He was on his knees between my legs and had not yet wiped the spit from his mouth.

 

“ _Alors_ ,” he said. “ _Faut’t’nir l’hostie sur’l’langue et n’chamais mord’ dadon._ ”

 

One takes the Holy Spirit, the Body of Christ, onto his tongue and holds it there and does not bite into it. I placed my hands on his shoulders. He flinched, but I held fast.

 

“You see,” I told him, “that’s another man’s flesh you’ve had in your mouth.”

 

Quite the wrong thing to say. Cue _Pater Noster, Ave Maria_ etc etc etc. I had to kiss him to shut him up, and he froze. Stopped breathing.

 

“You’ve prayed on it,” I said, “and now you have my blessing. I’ll be the Bishop and lay my _hostie_ on your tongue.”

 

It’s all worship and prayer in some form or other, isn’t it? He seemed game, so we had another go at it. You’d think the talk of priests and all that would have flattened my cock, but it had the opposite effect. So hard I was aching for him. I laced my fingers in his hair to guide him down. Bad mistake. He was furious! Shouted at me and gave a good tug on the old wig in retaliation.

 

“ _M’sieur Graifs, chpeux pas, chpeux pas - chui désolé, chui désolé -_ ”

 

Blasted temper appeals to me. I don’t know what else to say. I know you’ve got your hand down your own trousers, Theo, you dirty little infidel. He was terrible, but such a pretty face even in sadness and fury, I had to kiss him all over. Consecrate him. Commit him to memory. What if I should have to return to England and take up my father’s titles without him? I would have to marry someone, deposit a son or two onto the alter at my grandfather’s feet to be done with it, and then I could have him. But if he would not come? I kissed him everywhere, until his limbs had softened and he stilled, and I kissed more, so that he should come, at least, in this way. Ha. Ha.

 

This is how it began with the paintbrush and the oil. He had never been touched with any great care in his life. Everything seemed to affect him. The softness of the horsetail, the slick of the oil. He trembled beneath them. I showed him the letters for Croyance, which he whispered back to me in English, and for Percival and paintbrush and England and whatever else entered my head at the time. His skin was warm. Now when he prayed it was with something like reverence.

 

He took the brush from my hand and my fingers in his mouth and said, “ _Chte suce_.”

 

Until now I had been “vous” to him, Theo. A veritable stranger. He took my fingers into his mouth, and as it is said in the Bible, we “came to know” one another.

 

After that I began to find it difficult to keep sending him off. Where does he sleep, I wondered?

 

“ _En ville. Don’l’couain.” Dans le coin._ Around.

 

Inside or outside? Was it warm enough? Had he ever slept on a featherbed, or only straw? What did he eat? Which cafes did he frequent? Who gave him the money? I wanted to know everything there was to know about him. If Balzac had penned his life in 9,000 pages, I would devour them in a day.

 

I charged him with the task of narrating himself to me while I painted. At first it pained him. He lacked words. I read aloud to him, all manner of books. He had never seen so much as a child’s reader or a household ledger. Not even the Good Book, which he still quotes better than I.

 

I got the whole sordid tale in fragments. His birth in the nunnery, which was also a school for the daughters of pious moneyed families. His youth was spent ensconced in the narrow cosmos of the cloister. Praying and gardening. He did much of the work, for the old gardener who trained him had the rheumatism in his legs and could no longer kneel to prune or dig. It was hard work, but he was fed twice daily by the nuns and once in the evening by his old man. Often he was whipped by one of the nuns across the palm or for the worst crimes on the skin of his back.

 

What were his crimes, I asked.

 

The _Révérende Mère_ enumerated them, or rather, invented them as she saw fit. His greatest transgression, the Original Sin, was birth itself. For that he was punished in numerous ways. With the whippings, scrubbing floors, missing meals. I won’t go deeply into the details of it all. It’s terribly sad. Moreso once you know him; my drawing simply doesn’t do him justice.

 

The days passed in our little corner of the cosmos, and I had already masked the first layer of painting with a new pose when he reached the part in his story where the narrative breaks off. There was a little girl in the nuns’ school called Modèstie who stole away to visit him from time to time. She would bring chalk and tablet and he would clip fruit and flowers from the trees in exchange for learning his letters. They hadn’t progressed very far, though he could now read several of the words from his daily prayers, when they were caught in the act by the _Révérende Mère_ , who was so infuriated by this transgression of protocol she boxed the poor girl’s ears on the spot, and his own, as well as locking him away in the garden shed.

 

Credence himself was cold as glass he told me these details. They hardly touched him anymore. He sat perfectly still before the screen as I’d directed and said,

 

“ _Elle m’a dit qu’elle allait app’ler les gardes pour’q’elle vienne m’arrêter et qu’elle’m charg’rait d’larcin et m’ferait galérien._ ”

 

The scoundrel of a nun had convinced him he was to be arrested by the guards and shipped off into galley slavery in Toulon. He sat in the shed all night praying for guidance and alternating trying to slip out through the door, which remained fast. It was the old man who smuggled him out at break of dawn through a concealed crack in the wall. He was fifteen.

 

Do you remember fifteen, Theo? Was that the year of the clotted creme incident? My father, may the Good Lord keep him, had decided to give a good whack at the “hands on” approach. I could not sit for a week, and at the suggestion of the family physician that regular brutalising might inhibit my ability to produce heirs, he never tried to lay his “hands on” me again. Our Young Credence had no such luck. Some men have their fate writ by God at the time of their birth. Credence’s author was a Goethe or Voltaire. One piece of bad luck followed the other for him, and he found himself quite literally in a den of thieves.

 

Here, alas, I must abandon the tale until our next correspondence. My lover calls to me from the arms of our mutual companion, the featherbed. It would interest you to know that he has since become most skilled and enthusiastic a player of the bagpipes. Bugger it all, Theo. What an absurd world it is, where my marriage to a baseborn whore would be almost more a scandal than a union with a man, and the combination of both would cost me my estate. Perhaps I can teach him the work of a valet. He could even sleep in my room.

 

Yours in confidence, and in love,

 

Percy


	2. Chapter 2

18 May 1832, Paris

 

Well, well, well, we _have_ been busy. You can tell your Leta to leave me be. I have, as of yet, no interest in growing a _beard_. Not at least until I return to Mother England. You have been burning the letters, haven’t you, Theo? I should hate to think they were lying about the estate for some snooping housemaid to discover and send in to an overzealous local sheriff. Hard labour would do terrible things to my hands. I shudder to think of it. _Quel monde cruel et injuste_! You see, I have taken in a bit of the Republican spirit. Imbibed her, so to speak. Their propaganda is very effective, and there is the added benefit of not having to live under the threat of shame and punishment for my choice in lover, so long as I remain discreet. _Burn the letters._

 

Anyway, I believe congratulations is due on your most recent _victoria_ in the House. I too have hosted the Lady of late; first painting sold, not to Seraphine, but to a Duke. It was the Narcissus, of course. Not quite my _magnum opus_ , but it will pay for wine and a new vest. Seraphine claimed my talent would be wasted on the papered walls of her dressing room and gave her blessing.

 

When I first presented the work, she drew back and asked for a drink.

 

“ _Tu aimes le catholique_ , _toi,_ ” she accused.

 

Do I love him? Obviously. I had already told you as much. With him I had not yet been quite as forthcoming, nor with Seraphine. He was off that day with his little cafe _amis_ , more on them later.

 

“And so what if I do?”

 

She consumed three glasses of my best brandy before I managed to get it out of her.

 

“ _Mais tu sais bien, Percy, qu’il ne t’aimera jamais comme il aime le Christ et le ventre plein_.”

 

Such was the nature of her accusation, dear Theo, that I should never be loved more fully by Credence than his Jesus Christ and his full belly. So, then! Let him eat, let him pray. Let him have his Jesus and his belly full to bursting! Love is patient, love is kind, etc etc etc. Surely love can make an allowance for sustenance, physically, in the soul? Can a man not simply feel pleasure, please himself, find comfort in good company? Séraphine cannot understand this philosophy. She loves nothing more than a vault of money and the knowledge that her mistress is lovelier than the mistress of her husband.

 

I jest. Séraphine loves her Italian mistress, Musichetta. A funny thing about Musichetta. She runs schemes on the students in the cafes and it turns out has been using our man Credence, the little scoundrel, to make her acquaintance with them. He has a trustworthy face, which brings me back to our story.

 

It was spring of ‘25. Credence was fifteen. He had never been outside the walls of the Cloister or School or whatever it was, and he was very hungry and very cold. A kindly man outside a cafe bought him wine and cake and told him he had a pretty face, and would he like to make the acquaintance of a group of boys and men who could find him honest work? Put frankly, Theo, he was an absolute fool. Honest work! I think he must have suffered some damage to his tophat in infancy. It’s lucky he survived that night, let alone the better portion of a decade since.

 

He went along with this stranger to the city wall. Our young Credence, you remember, had been born in the nunnery. He had no passport with which to pass at the gates, but these thieves used their own tricks - namely, the city sewers. I shan’t get bogged up in the dirty details of this route. Suffice to say, the sewers are under the streets, as sewers often are. Credence’s own testament, translated, as my wrist is beginning to ache, is as follows:

 

“We went through the sewer to _la Zone_ and back every morning and every night, late in the night. It stunk awfully. I had to cross with my clothes in a bundle under the arm and bathe in the Seine, or else I would stink the whole day. The smell would cling to my nostrils. I was always sick from the smell, the miasma, but we had some money usually, so I could buy a macaron, so it could have been worse.”

 

He’s a bit of a sweet tooth. A sweet fang, really. Would you believe, Dear Theo, that my butter-eyed little fawn of a model was in the business of robbing gentle ladies at the point of his knife? _Le Jeune Lucifer_ , I shall have to call him. My young Devil. Cast out and into Hell, _et_ _quel enfer!_ The ladies liked him for his pretty, rosy lips and his handsome suit, which has since grown threadbare and small for him. I have promised to buy him another. Quite the young dandy, our Lucifer. At the time he kept a pet tortoise which he would take on the promenade - that was his lure, though he claims also to have been fond of the creature. His only education having been entirely Biblical, he had named his shelled companion Pierre, for Peter the Apostle, both having to be called for thrice before they would come as their master willed it. Clever lad!

 

From what I understand of the matter, Credence and Pierre resided much of the time in _la Zone_ , which is a wretched slum, a number worse than any in London, I should think. Though I know those only as fables in themselves.

 

They lived in the carcass of a rotted-out omnibus that had been caught in a fire and discarded there, a hovel-palace, with the luxury of straw upon which our little lordling and his apostle could sleep when the time allowed. Elsewhile, they roamed the streets. They promenaded. At times they were invited to entertain the actresses along the _Boulevard du Crime._ They enjoyed his sweet voice, though he sang only the old hymnals in Latin. Often while singing he would think of his mother and the little Modèstie and would cry (rather prettily, one can imagine), and for this he was tipped in surplus. He enjoyed his employ with the actresses, though it was little more than sweets money. It was entirely his own venture. They were kind to him, and they laughed gently when he stumbled over his words, and they called him little flea, which I myself have begun to employ with him. He never wants to leave my bed and my skin is littered with his bites (ha!).

 

The bulk of Credence’s waking hours, however, were devoted to his primary occupation. The tortoise, you see, was the lure for the lure, a part of the disguise of the young dandy with which he would lock in a willing and gullible young woman, lead her down a quiet alley and stand guard as she was robbed of her valuables by his colleagues.

 

For this he has condemned himself already to Hell. I suppose we can keep each other company there when the time comes, although I should privately like to believe that God Himself is one of our number. Is Jesus and Judas not the original Romeo and Juliette? Am I still living, or have I been struck from my perch on the boughs of the Tree of Life by a blast from the Almighty Above?

 

Testing - still here. You must tell me if I am rambling on, old thing. You know how I love the sound of my own voice.

 

Where was I? Credence was fifteen and then he was not. You see, Theseus, his good fortune could never hold long. Our young cursed bird had been hard at toil for the better half of a decade when all changed in a blow. It was the young lady did it. The little Modèstie, herself a now young lady of fourteen or fifteen. (Credence can never be certain. His maths is very weak.) She had been released from the Cloister-prison and was to be returned to a father and mother from the country, accompanied by her chaperone, the Reverende-Mere, when she saw the boy she had always remembered from her early girlhood, a man now and healthier and haler than ever he had been then. But she recognised him and called to him - _Croyance_! - and came after him, though he had hoisted up Pierre and had begun to run away.

 

She followed him all the way down the street, lifting her skirts to run faster. She wanted to see him up close, for she had always feared and believed him to be a prisoner in some southern galley. Such were the threats, you remember, with which the Reverende Mere was wont to keep him line. The Reverende Mere was old but hardy and kept pace with her young charge. They were the both of them a deal better fed, I should think, than our young Credence, and quickly outstripped him. So too had the guild of thieves. Believing the girl and her “mother” to be fresh victims, they formed a ring about the two. Knives were drawn. The Reverende Mere is said to have made a very impassioned appeal to their Christian nature. Then she recognised Credence. He used my own hand to illustrate the art in which she caressed his cheek after so long apart, which is to say that she struck him very hard and rapid-fire, like the minute men load their rifles. The mark is still there, though her ring was stolen.

 

I shall not mince words, Theo. He stuck her with his knife. He had never used it. The injury was not deep, but he became frightened at the spilling of blood, and he ran. He frequents the cafe since and much regrets his hasty abandonment of Pierre, who is said to have been a delicious soup, he wishes he could have tasted it.

 

This is all to say that I am keeping terrible company, delightful company. I am very much in love. It’s a rotten thing, to be in love with someone so sad and so poor and so achingly beautiful. Have I told you of his beauty? It would bore you. You have always lacked finesse in your taste. You have no love of poetry, but love is poetry, I tell you, Theo. Though you would never believe it, love is the screaming tocsin-heart and the toxin-head and the vice versa and the wine and the church bell and all the noise, and all the stupid verses about rose petals and the pornography and the bloody chorus, the _Rule Britannia_ sung at the loudest level, ears-splitting; I have not been able to eat in days, though it bothers me not a bit. I feed my lunches to him. Thus is life abiding.

 

For now, we live simply. The world around us grows more and more complex by the day. Credence’s friends, the students in the cafe, plan treachery.

 

I shall not enumerate. He confided in me only if I promised to keep his words to myself in their entirety, and I shall, though my sole confession to you, dear Theo, is that I worry for his safety. He is neither hale nor hardy nor particularly clever at avoiding blows (just this morning he arrived sporting an eye and a cheek freshly blackened by the porter of some young lady’s boarding house, some girl he sleeps cheek-and-cheek with, like a pair of babes in arms, a young grisette called Nani-something-or-other). If he goes along with these young revolutionaries, I fear he will be shot or arrested. Strike the thought, Theo, but I know it to be true. I have made visits, you see, with the Madame Fortune Reader in one of the seedier opium dens, one of my favourites. She does the French cards and the Romanian and the tea and the smoke readings and the whole lot of it for a mark-up when one has been in his pipes, so to speak. I was, as it were, in my pipes. Floating. You simply must try opium one day, Theo.

 

The reading spelled disaster. Cards, smoke, the lot of it. Barricades in ruins. Students destroyed. Credence with the red poppy blossoming across his tatty shirt. The only good fortune to be had was the one transplanted from my pockets into the clever hands of Madame Fortune Reader. I tried to tell Credence, but he will not hear it. He speaks fervently of this promised paradise. The Republic reborn! Equality to the baseborn, to the little bastard children and whipping boys languishing in Cloister garden sheds the world over! I taught him to spell Robespierre, just to appease him, and Rousseau. The latter of which he doesn’t like to write anymore, now that he knows of Rousseau’s foundlings (lostlings?). He simply cannot understand the abandonment of children. It pains him greatly.

 

My only consolation is the grisette, his sleeping partner. She also disapproves of all this revolutionary tosh and has warned him, rather crudely but effectively, to settle down deep in the pockets of his wealthy English benefactor before he gets his head blown off.

 

He sleeps on yonder featherbed now as I write to you. I have been painting all morning. The sun was coming in through the window just so, you see. The details would bore you, but suffice to say the light, the impasto, the etc etc etc that would have horrified David or any other of the respectable painters whose ateliers cannot be found here on the left bank, in Montparnasse, this faux-Grecian hillock. And this painting in particular will never sell. It cannot. I intend to keep it, you see, entirely to myself. The young dandy thief on the promenade, sans bruises. Forever young and alive. Credence, when he wakes, will call me foolish. Idol-worshipper.

 

I have him dressed for now in my own clothing, with promise of a visit to my very favourite tailor for a fresh suit on the morrow.

 

“And when I arrive at the gates to Heaven in another man’s suit, I will be struck at once!”

 

He wailed all morning. He dislikes my collars, my jacquard vest, my silk ties, my underthings. Ah, I thought, so he wants them off. Do you remember that fantastic story in the papers many years ago, about the boy who had been raised in the forest by a pack of wolves only to resurface naked and dirty as a young man in some old widow’s garden? It was my favourite bit of news at the time. Imagine this young human animal, inconsolable in a pair of shoes, scratching at his necktie! This was our Credence. His taste is very French. He would rather his own clothing or nothing at all. We have settled for the latter.

 

I must leave you now, however, before he wakes. The light won’t hold for long.

 

Best and love and burn this damned thing, etc etc etc,

Yours,

Percy.


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